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Causing a Scene: Neoliberal Urbanism and Spatial Production in Post-Recession New York City

Jacob Ertel

“Finally, he was quartered…This last operation was very long, because the horses used were not accustomed to drawing; consequently, instead of four, six were needed; and when that did not suffice, they were forced, in order to cut off the wretch’s thighs, to sever the sinews and hack at the joints….”[1]
In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Foucault depicts the brutal public torture and execution of Robert-Francois Damiens in 1757 for attempted regicide. Damiens’ execution was intended as more than a spectator ceremony or an expression of sovereign power: it represented a mode of discipline and a practice of social learning. Such rituals were soon outlived, however, as the unintended heroization of the victim through the displacement of shame to the executioner proved politically ineffective. Torture as a public spectacle, according to Foucault, had mostly died out by the beginning of the 19th century in lieu of more generalized forms of control such as prisons and asylums: “the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment.”[2]

Over 200 years after Damiens’ death, the spectacle is making a comeback as a primary structuring mechanism of public life and state self-legitimation. Of course, differences abound. Instead of the writhing body, “the display of the commodity has become a central part of the spectacle, as crowds flock to gaze at them and at each other in intimate and secure spaces”[3] across the country. Rather than construing criminalized behavior as an expression of civil unrest, moreover, it is above all perceived as a threat to the efficiency of “urban strategies to capture consumer dollars to compensate for deindustrialization,” the success of which “rests in part on the way in which the act of buying connects to the pleasure of the spectacle in secured spaces, safe from violence or political agitation.”[4] Gentrification has succeeded public torture as a tactic by which the state reproduces itself through the neoliberalized production of urban space.

Foucault’s relative disinterest in political economy is no secret; a consideration of the re-creation of the spectacle as a central facet of urban life must take seriously the impact of flexible accumulation after Fordism’s implosion in the early 1970s. It is not enough to assert that gentrification (along with its corollaries of surveillance, criminalization, and dispossession) constitutes a new mode of statecraft. More important is to understand the processes through which gentrification became not merely a preferred urban strategy, but a structurally engrained one under flexible accumulation. Taking New York City as a case study, this essay offers three modest suggestions. First, that the origins of contemporary gentrification arose as a response to the collapse of Fordism as deindustrialization and privatization emerged as preferred federal policies. Second, that whereas the deregulation of financial markets under flexible accumulation entailed the withdrawal of the state from urban spatial production, contemporary neoliberalism since the mid-1990s sees the state serving a decidedly regulatory role in the effort to attract greater amounts of speculative and finance capital. Third, that the increased level of state involvement in gentrification since the stock market crash of 1987 requires the implementation of a distinctively carceral logic, as fiscal discipline in financial markets is accompanied by the punishment of the poor in the hyper-commodification of urban space.1973-1987: Recession and Reinvestment

The role of the state with regard to gentrification has oscillated between minimal and significant involvement since the 1970s. Before the onset of the global economic recession in 1973, cities were largely disinvested, as suburbanization-not gentrification-constituted the primary state policy of the post-war period. This often took the form of development subsidies for highways and tax breaks for corporations that facilitated the movement of industrial jobs to cities’ peripheries. The effect was ‘white flight’ out of the urban core.[5] Subsidized white suburbanization had dire consequences for those left behind in the city, with little recourse to a diminishing number of jobs in the light manufacturing industry and an increased reliance on social services that would soon undergo cutbacks or privatization. What gentrification did occur from the 1960s to 1973 was sporadic and isolated to small towns in the northeast. Hackworth and Smith refer to this period as gentrification’s first-wave, in which “local and national governments sought to counteract the private-market economic decline of central city neighborhoods.” [6] In other words, because most urban spaces were bereft of capital compared to their suburban counterparts, reinvestment could only occur in conjunction with some form of state-provided insurance, as investors and developers were more hesitant to commit to disinvested areas.

Despite the state’s encouragement of private investment throughout this first-wave of gentrification, this dynamic was largely overridden by federal disinvestment. Most cities-even those with small pockets of renewal-suffered as a result. Urban disinvestment was especially compounded by the crisis of 1973, which witnessed the influx of both people and production lines into further remote and rural areas. As Harvey explains, “Fixed capital investments and physical infrastructures in existing locations were consequently threatened with massive devaluation, thus undermining the property tax base and fiscal capacity of many urban governments at a time of increasing need.”[7] In New York City, only Manhattan emerged relatively unscathed from the recession, while homes in less developed neighborhoods like the South Bronx lost between one-quarter to one-third of their value.[8]

The crisis represented more than devaluation and capital flight, however: it signified the emergence of large scale economic restructuring. Amidst civil unrest within the cities, the federal government, at the hand of Nixon, simultaneously diminished the government’s role in providing social services while reducing taxes for cities after prematurely declaring the end of the so-called ‘urban crisis.’[9] (This legacy would continue throughout subsequent presidencies. Between 1977 and 1985, for example, the percentage of New York City’s budget contributed by the federal government had fallen from 19 to 9 percent, and from 18 to a mere 2 percent in Los Angeles.[10]) These factors necessitated the borrowing of increased amounts of money through banks through municipal bonds, as cities found themselves in unprecedented amounts of debt. At the same time, services expenses continued to rise, including a 3 percent jump in New York City between 1974 and 1975. The city went into technical financial bankruptcy when it was finally unable to pay off its debt in 1975, signaling the imminence of neoliberal restructuring and a new urban regime. As Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits began to plummet in real value (falling 40 percent between 1970 and 1991), [11] New York City rescinded a wage increase for local workers, raised the subway fare, and began to charge tuition for the City University of New York (CUNY).[12]

New York’s fiscal restructuring likewise had a fundamental impact on gentrification. Along with property devaluation, industrious private developers and investors began to redevelop large portions of previously disinvested neighborhoods. Gentrification boomed as markets began to recover in the late 1970s. According to Hackworth and Smith, “New neighborhoods were converted into real estate ‘frontiers,’ and cities that had not previously experienced gentrification implemented far-reaching strategies to attract this form of investment.”[13] This second-wave of gentrification lasted throughout the 1980s and is distinguished from the first-wave according to several key features. Perhaps most importantly, it reflected the transition from the Fordist-Keynesian regime characterized by a comparatively strong welfare state, low unemployment, and mass production and consumption to one of flexible accumulation. Consequences of flexible accumulation such as deindustrialization, fiscal austerity, and mass unemployment, along with increasingly mainstream political appeals to privatization and the glorification of free market rationality, likewise facilitated and maintained this transition such that a range ideologically variegated urban governments all adopted policies with greater degrees of harmony than dissonance.[14] Harvey succinctly describes this process as the transition from the ‘managerial approach’ of urban governance of the 1960s to one of urban entrepreneurialism.[15] What primarily distinguishes urban entrepreneurialism from its predecessor, according to Harvey, is the initiation of a ‘public-private partnership’ between local governments and private investors, in which municipalities must compete with one another to attract external sources of funding. Such activity is inherently entrepreneurial because of its purely speculative nature, as opposed to the minor and sporadic instances of state-led development that occurred throughout gentrification’s first-wave.[16]

The implementation of urban entrepreneurialism had profound implications for cities and, more generally, for the burgeoning flexible accumulation regime. In particular, the transition to urban entrepreneurialism exemplifies the impact of an increasingly globalizing economy in which “investment increasingly takes the form of a negotiation between international finance capital and local powers doing the best they can to maximize the attractiveness of the local site as a lure for capitalist development.”[17] This process of negotiation and speculation entails a degree of competition between urban governments, a dynamic intensified by the rapidity of transnational capital flows through and across spatial boundaries so critical to globalization. Yet as cities must compete for private capital, Harvey explains, the adversarial nature of urban entrepreneurialism operates as an “‘external coercive power’…to bring them closer into line with the discipline and logic of capitalist development.” [18] In other words, competition between urban localities for private investment hinges on the imbalance of use-values and exchange-values in conversion of space into a speculative investment arena. Cities become spaces for the procurement of capital, with the gentrifying class experiencing investment through its own increased mobility, ownership capabilities, and ostensible security.

Despite this wave of reinvestment, the effect on the urban poor was eerily similar to that of federal disinvestment prior to the crisis of 1973. The victims of federal disinvestment’s ‘spatial apartheid’[19]witnessed the disappearance of the local manufacturing industry; yet as the importation of financial services served as the impetus for revitalization projects, major cities experienced the consolidation of low-wage service sector positions and the growth of poverty rates while social service provision continued to experience cutbacks. Private reinvestment was especially prevalent in New York during this period, as a booming art scene in SoHo and the Lower East Side was accompanied by robust bouts of gentrification.[20] While reinvestment in newly ‘hip’ areas was taking off, however, the urban periphery suffered. As Hackworth notes, “Residential building alterations…during the 1980s were highly clustered in the reinvested core, while demolitions during the decade were clustered in the extant zones of deep disinvestment-the south Bronx, northern Manhattan, and northeastern Brooklyn.” [21] No longer the risky endeavor it had been under the Fordist-Keynesian regime, the second-wave of gentrification found the state largely obsolete. Yet this was about to change.1987-1996: Crash and Capital Flight

The crash of the stock market in 1987 devastated New York. The city lost 770,000 jobs-eight percent of its payroll employment-between 1989 and 1992,[22] effectively undoing any multi-sector job growth made over the course of the decade. [23] The real estate market was especially impacted due to the influence of private investors over the urban political economy-investors simply withdrew their capital once the market crashed. The exit of private investors from major cities (New York was hardest hit) marks a second period of major disinvestment, though this time at the hand of corporate enterprise rather than the state. Many economists and mainstream publications interpreted this bout of disinvestment as gentrification’s death knell in (incorrectly) predicting the consequent de-gentrification of the city.[24] On the contrary, the recession provided the impetus for greater state involvement in gentrification. In 1991, while capital flows into gentrifying neighborhoods were constricted due to the crash, hundreds of homeless people were evicted from the Lower East Side’s Tompkins Square Park to make room for a publicly financed two-year renovation. [25] Tompkins Square Park proved typical of the state’s expanding role in gentrification. As Smith and DeFillipis note, the park’s “reopening in 1993 as a much sanitized, high surveillance space was accompanied by a predictable rhetoric of neighborhood rebirth, a judgment corroborated some months later by a resurgent real estate market.”[26] New York’s entire real estate market was booming by 1996, but it also reflected significant changes to the process of gentrification. Many small landlords, unable to carry out business after the crash, had abandoned the city in 1989 after the city refused to “expropriate properties for tax delinquency.” [27] This movement simultaneously marked the end of urban entrepreneurialism and the birth of a third-wave of gentrification. Because gentrification under urban entrepreneurialism was concentrated in a ‘reinvested core’ near cities’ central business districts, most of these areas had been fully reinvested by the time of the 1987 crash.[28] As globalization had facilitated a level of deindustrialization unprecedented during the federally subsidized suburbanization of the Fordist-Keynesian period, promising middle-class industrial jobs to encourage white flight out of the city was no longer available as a viable policy option.

Instead, investors began to search for less economically promising neighborhoods in less central locations and with protections such as public housing, but with the help of increased state assistance. In 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had been responsible for addressing the potential impact of gentrification in cities across the country, was drained of its regulatory powers over local affordable housing issues. The dissolution of the HUD-an agency whose establishment had been influenced by social movements of the 1960s[29]-was embodied by the introduction of the HOPE VI program, through which the state provides grants to local housing authorities and “municipal governments to remove public housing units for the purpose of redevelopment without one-for-one replacement.”[30] According to Wyly and Hammel, these grants are largely aimed at public complexes that represent outliers in otherwise reinvested neighborhoods. [31]State assistance, then, ironically entails the federal abandonment of any redistributive capacities at the same time as it endows local governments with enhanced capabilities in the realm of urban spatial production. This paradoxical movement has led to the expansion of the reinvested core, indicated by the rapid growth in property markets throughout the late 1990s in northwestern and central Brooklyn, as well as the rise in housing costs in previously reinvested neighborhoods such as lower Manhattan and northeastern Brooklyn. [32] And whereas housing prices in neighborhoods such as Washington Heights and East Harlem had fallen by roughly 40 and 43 percent between 1989 and 1996, prices in these same areas skyrocketed between 1996 and 2002 by 333 and 500 percent, respectively. [33] The “emphasis upon tourism, the production and consumption of spectacles,” and “the promotion of ephemeral events within a given locale”[34] that characterized urban entrepreneurialism throughout the 1980s still exist, but urban municipalities must now compete for private investment vis-à-vis a range of state assistance mechanisms, thus signifying the culmination of the transition from an economy encouraging mass public consumption to one embodied by increasingly precarious service sector positions, wealth disparities, and the liquidation of the welfare state.

Depending on whom you ask, gentrification in New York during the 1990s was either a smashing success or a macabre catastrophe. Analysts like Freeman and Braconi exemplify the former position. In a 2004 study, they argue that problems associated with disinvestment and a high concentration of poverty “could be ameliorated if wealthier households increasingly settle within central cities, raising taxable income and property values and stimulating retail activity in sales tax proceeds.”[35] Most bumptious is their claim that “the infusion of residents with more political influence may help the community to procure better public services,” and that “the employment prospects of low-income residents could also be enhanced if gentrification contributes to local job creation….”[36] Mistaking the symptom for the cause, such sentiments echo the neoliberal perspective that avers the obsolescence of the state as a provider of social welfare. In its stead, the benevolent middle class is posited as white savior, salvaging cities under duress by bringing in the high-quality public services and putative job creation that was previously the state’s responsibility. The only problem is that in doing so, the very people Freeman and Braconi believe would benefit from this form of ‘assistance’ are displaced. Freeman and Braconi brush such concerns aside by asserting that increases in rent throughout the 1990s in gentrifying neighborhoods were actually accompanied by lower probabilities of displacement than in non-gentrifying areas. [37] Gentrification is thus justified through the promise of neighborhood improvements that residents of all income levels may enjoy, such that the poor may work harder to stay put and enjoy the new plethora of advantages characteristic of urban renewal.

Closer inspection presents a starkly different picture. From 1991 to 1993, the number of displaced residents in New York stood at 25,023, nearly 6,000 fewer than from 1989 to 1991. This reduction should be expected because of the temporary slow of reinvestment during the recession, which New York experienced most acutely in the first years of the 1990s. From 1993 to 1996, however, the number of displaces had risen back to roughly the same as between 1989 and 1991, only to jump to 43,067 between 1996 and 1999.[38] Moreover, between 8 and 11.6 percent of all movers between 1996 and 2002 had been displaced from a previous residence.[39] In a 2005 study using New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS) data, Newman and Wyly found slightly lower percentages but noted that real figures are likely substantially higher, as statistics provided by the NYCHVS do “not include displaced households that left New York City, doubled up with other households, became homeless, or entered the shelter system.”[40] Displacement was in full swing by 1996, with renters and sellers of apartments participating in informal auctions that jacked up unit prices, and landlords harassing tenants in the attempt to extract higher rents.[41] In considering the impact of gentrification then, it is crucial to understand the rapid displacement that occurs during the initial phases of reinvestment, as well as the ability of the poor to move into new neighborhoods, many of which may also be undergoing gentrification. As gentrification is inextricable from the ways in which cities experience political and economic interventions, cutbacks in social services along with state-assisted corporate development exemplifies the tension between what Newman and Wyly understand as “the use values of neighborhood and home, versus the exchange values of real estate as a vehicle for capital accumulation.” [42] It is here that neoliberalism begins to rearticulate itself as a regulatory project in the urban arena, as the state’s deregulatory moves throughout the flexible accumulation of the 1980s are transmuted through the construction of state-dependent urban markets.Neoliberal Urbanism and Reregulation

New York’s booming real estate market in 1996 signified the succession of urban entrepreneurialism by a third-wave of gentrification predicated on state assistance to investors and developers. This heightening of state involvement-amplified by the impact of globalization on the real estate industry that has made gentrification more favorable to larger corporate developers-is manifested through the expansion of reinvestment beyond the urban core and the consequent elimination of militant resistance to gentrification by way of displacement.[43] As with the first-wave of gentrification, the state involvement that began in the mid-1990s benefits capital by mitigating risks associated with reinvestment, [44] but the comparatively strong welfare programs so central to the Fordist-Keynesian regime have been all but eliminated and replaced by workfare programs such as the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Whereas “openly encouraging a process that would displace a given group for the sake of another would have [had] to be offset by more progressive parallel regulation and ideology if the welfare state balance was to be maintained”[45]during the first-wave of gentrification, such obstacles to the restructuring of urban space no longer exist. Herein lies a paradox central to the contemporary state of gentrification: while the state has removed itself from the realm of social service provision, it has assumed a more regulatory role in producing the spatial relations that give rise to the necessity of such provision as it simultaneously becomes increasingly enmeshed within the deregulated capital flows so central to globalization.

This alteration in statecraft reaches beyond the production of urban space under neoliberalism: it represents a fundamental change in neoliberalism itself. In other words, neoliberalism as characterized by the flexibilization of regulatory apparatuses and the imposition of retrenchment policies during the 1980s has transmogrified into a comparatively normalized and technocratic regime while continuing to erode niches of social cohesion and unification, even as economic crises loom large. Peck and Tickell refer to this process as the shift from “roll-back neoliberalism” to “roll-out neoliberalism,” in which the initial agenda concerned with the “destruction and discreditation of Keynesian-welfarist and social-collectivist institutions” became “one focused on the purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations.” [46] Urban entrepreneurialism in the 1980s was fueled by competition between cities for private finance capital by disestablishing a range of social and environmental regulations. This mode of inter-urban competition was ‘successful’ because it enabled localities like New York City to accelerate their own development through attracting increasingly mobile capital and resources. [47] Yet Peck and Tickell explain that as inter-urban competition became intrinsic to neoliberalism in the 1980s, urban governments were simultaneously “becoming tendentially subject in one way or another to the disciplinary force of neoliberalized spatial relations.”[48] Through competing for their own reconstitution as urban spectacles, then, cities become “accomplices in their own subordination” by “validating and reproducing the extralocal rule systems to which they are (increasingly) subjected” and “subsidizing the very geographic mobility that first rendered them vulnerable.”[49] Financial speculation thus signifies both the lifeblood of the city as well as the essence of urban poverty and subjugation.

This facet of contemporary neoliberalism finds its truest expressions in three core political-economic domains. First, state power at the national level has been extended to the local level; though welfare reform has entailed localization on one level (through the federal endowment of block grants to local governments, for example), this has occurred within “the context of a close orchestration of the processes of institutional reform and policy steering” [50] at the national level. Second, previously politicized issues such as trade policy and corporate taxation are now “variously parlayed into technocratic structures and routinized conventions, absorbed by transnational agencies and metaregulatory frameworks, or exposed to the ‘markets.'”[51] This means that the parameters of public political debate are minimized and subsumed by macroeconomic state policy. Third, and perhaps most crucial, is the normalization of precarious and contingent work in the realm of social policy by way of the reconstruction of the deindustrialized labor market, the simultaneous implementation of workfare programs, and the hyper-criminalization of poverty.[52] Whereas the growth of informal economies was largely tolerated during urban entrepreneurialism’s peak, public disorder will not be tolerated in an economic condition in which urban competition for investment has fully reconstituted “social-welfarist arrangements as anticompetitive costs” and rendered “redistribution and social investment as antagonistic to the overriding objects of economic development.”[53] The elimination of social benefits as a measure of competitiveness thus helps explain the discursive justifications for gentrification’s expansion in its third-wave into previously untouched zones, as putative concerns establishing a link between welfare dependency and criminality operationalize the logic exemplified above by Freeman and Braconi. Yet rather than liberating markets through privatization and deregulation, contemporary neoliberalism is better understood through the political construction of markets according to parameters of competitiveness and privatized management as it contemporaneously proclaims its impotency in the regulatory arena. [54] This movement only pushes neoliberalism forward to ever expansive and, in the case of New York, brutal iterations.Policing the Crisis

The political-economic development of city-as-spectacle throughout the second and third-waves of gentrification constitutes both a mode of urban spatial production and state self-legitimation under neoliberalism. To Foucault, the spectacle of public torture was an (ultimately flawed) method by which sovereign power sought to reassert its dominance by attacking those who disobeyed the governing laws of the polity. The current state of gentrification operates remarkably similarly. There is perhaps no one that better embodies this paradigm than Rudolph Giuliani, who presided as mayor over New York City from 1994 to 2001. Elected to revive the city from the depths of the recession, Giuliani inverted the causal relationship embedded within gentrification. “Rather than indict capitalists for capital flight” or “landlords for abandoning buildings” during the recession, Smith argues, Giuliani instead “identified homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, squatters, graffiti artists, ‘reckless bicyclists,’ and unruly youth as the major enemies of public order and decency, the culprits of urban decline generating widespread fear.”[55] New York City under Giuliani witnessed the mass transfer of social service funds to security and surveillance functions, substantiated by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s zero-tolerance approach towards small-scale misdemeanors. Between 1993 and 2001, for example, New York City budget allocations for the Department of Social Services, public assistance, and the City University system were all cut by 43.8 percent, 32.6 percent, and 39.1 percent, respectively. Budget allocations to the Department of Homeless Services were reduced by a staggering 95.2 percent due to mass layoffs and Giuliani’s attempt to entirely privatize the agency. At the same time, however, budget allocations for the police department grew by 38.3 percent. [56]

The point here is not to expose Giuliani as the arch-racist he is; rather, it is to illustrate how the necessary production of urban space-as-spectacle to attract capital investment must be viewed as ineluctable from the racialized criminalization of a class of people whose labor is rendered obsolete in a globalized post-Fordist economy. Giuliani’s brutish expression of neoconservative revanchism[57](carried on through his mayoral successor Michael Bloomberg) is condemnable, but it represents a structurally engrained tendency in the neoliberal production of urban space, one in which competition for state-aided corporate investment naturalizes neoliberalism’s deregulatory capacities in newly regulatory governmental regimes. Even the new affordable housing plan put forth by current New York City mayor Bill de Blasio-who ran on an effective anti-poverty program promising to combat the city’s wealth divide-has been met with resistance from residents of neighborhoods such as East New York, where new zoning rules would allow for taller buildings and a wider array of grocery stores and restaurants in the neighborhood’s main streets. [58] Given de Blasio’s reinstalling of Bratton as the city’s Police Commissioner and his unwavering support for forceful policing tactics in the wake of protests over the death of Freddie Gray,[59] national or local policies towards gentrification are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. For Foucault, torture as a public spectacle ultimately proved ineffective because it inadvertently displaced the locus of shame from the body of the condemned onto the executioner. Yet his story does not end happily. It remains to be seen whether gentrification and the forces driving it in its contemporary iteration will generate enough civil discontent to sufficiently disrupt the production of space-as-spectacle and expose what lies behind the curtain.